He reportedly performed facing the wall, which has been cited as evidence he was a shy man and reserved performer. He was buried in a homemade coffin furnished by the county. "Terraplane Blues" became a modest regional hit, selling 5,000 copies. Further details were absorbed from the imaginative retellings by Greil Marcus[59] and Robert Palmer. This lack of recognition extended to black musicians: "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note". House gave Johnson and future generations powerful guitar accompaniment and exceptional vocal control, exemplified in his a capella pieces, that have … "[121] Reviewers commented that the sound quality of the 2011 release was a substantial improvement on the 1990 release. [16] John Hammond, Jr., in the documentary The Search for Robert Johnson (1991), suggests that owing to poverty and lack of transportation Johnson is most likely to have been buried in a pauper's grave (or "potter's field") very near where he died. [105] Both were subsequently featured prominently in the printed materials associated with the 1990 CBS box set of the "complete" Johnson recordings, as well as being widely republished since that time. The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the man died of syphilis. The "dime-store photo" was first published, almost in passing, in an issue of Rolling Stone magazine in 1986, and the studio portrait in a 1989 article by Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow in 78 Quarterly. His music had a small, but influential, following during his life and in the two decades after his death. The one most closely associated with his life is that he sold his soul to the devil at a local crossroads to achieve musical success. When you know about something, and comperatively few other people know about it, that’s a crime in a way; you’ve got to do what you can to tell people, “Hey, check this cat out. One of the legends often told says that Johnson was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. And so when Robert Johnson came back, having left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. Further, both David "Honeyboy" Edwards and Robert Lockwood failed to identify either man in the photo. [5] Robert spent the next 8–9 years growing up in Memphis and attending the Carnes Avenue Colored School where he received lessons in arithmetic, reading, language, music, geography, and physical exercise. “If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write.”. Johnson had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about 15 miles (24 km) from Greenwood. But, it steadily permeated as a kind of underground album, which later exploded to the scene like a delayed reaction, after musical notables, one-by-one, began covering or being inspired by Johnson’s songs. In 2010, Guitar.com ranked him ninth in its list of "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time"—72 years after he died. [45] Eleven records from this session would be released within the following year. The blues researcher Mack McCormick began researching his family background in 1972, but died in 2015 without ever publishing his findings. He became the first African American billionaire after selling the network to Viacom in 2001. He stayed in the house with some of the negroes saying he wanted to pick cotton. The blues historian Steve Cheseborough wrote that it may be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads, because "Robert Johnson was a rambling guy".[67]. Late in life, House remembered Johnson as a "little boy" who was a competent harmonica player but an embarrassingly bad guitarist. [38] This idea has been thoroughly debunked, however, and there is no evidence that Johnson ever recorded facing into an corner. If one had asked black blues fans about Johnson in the first 20 years after his death, writes Elijah Wald, "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who?'" "[1][2] Musicians such as Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Robert Plant have cited both Johnson's lyrics and musicianship as key influences on their own work. All the published evidence, including a full chapter on the subject in the biography Crossroads, by Tom Graves, suggests an origin in the story of the blues musician Tommy Johnson. King of the Delta Blues Robert Johnson is probably the most famous of all delta bluesmen. Robert Johnson’s playing style, which is called the Robert Johnson Progression, has influenced all the blues guitarists that followed. Soon after, when Clapton formed his supergroup, Cream, they really helped to bring Johnson to the fore, with their recording of Crossroad Blues on the 1968 album, Wheels On Fire. [30] "Musicians who knew Johnson testified that he was a nice guy and fairly average—except, of course, for his musical talent, his weakness for whiskey and women, and his commitment to the road."[31]. Influences on Robert Johnson Tommy Johnson Son House Charley Patton Lonnie Johnson Kokomo Arnold Skip James Influenced by Robert Johnson Muddy Waters He also died young after recording only a handful of songs. These songs, recorded at low fidelity in improvised studios, were the totality of his recorded output. I’d just met Brian, and I went around to his apartment-crash pad, actually, all he had in it was a chair, a record player, and a few records. They were so utterly fluid. Tom Graves, in his book Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, relies on expert testimony from toxicologists to argue that strychnine has such a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised, even in strong liquor. The family and Robert moved to Memphis. Giving Dylan an advanced, pre-release version of the album (since he knew that Dylan was quite interested in early blues), it had a fair amount of impact on him. Robert Johnson influenced everyone from Muddy Waters to The Rolling Stones… In fact, they helped make famous Johnson’s stanza in Travelling Riverside Blues, “If you squeeze my lemon ’till the juice runs down my leg…” In 1969, Led Zeppelin built a song around this verse, with the Lemon Song on their album, Led Zeppelin II. The white man did not have a doctor for this negro as he had not worked for him. [11] Coffee recalled that Robert was absent for long periods, which suggests that he may have been living and studying in Memphis. (2019). His approach was complex and musically advanced. Before King of the Delta Blues Singers was released in 1961, Johnson’s influence was actually fairly limited. Johnson passed away on January 30, 1968. But he really turned Mick Jagger and especially Keith Richards onto early blues. "Robert Johnson: Hell Hound on His Trail". In other words, if you plucked him from timeline of music, travelling backwards in a Delorian and shooting him prior to his recordings, it’s likely that music from 1938 to 1961 would hardly have changed. In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson played 16 selections and recorded alternate takes for most of them. [36] In 1938, Columbia Records producer John H. Hammond, who owned some of Johnson's records, directed record producer Don Law to seek out Johnson to book him for the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. Robert Johnson even occasionally claimed to be Lonnie Johnson.[118]. He was registere… She died in childbirth shortly after. [29] "As for his character, everyone seems to agree that, while he was pleasant and outgoing in public, in private he was reserved and liked to go his own way". The Johnson family moved to Freeport, Illinois when Robert was young. Because you’re in for something extra in your life.” You want to know how good the blues can get? Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with the so-called devil at the crossroads. One of which was Robert Johnson. Son House rawness", but the train imitation on the bridge is not at all typical of Delta blues—it is more like something out of minstrel show music or vaudeville. [89] Columbia Records released the album King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation of Johnson's recordings, in 1961, which introduced his work to a much wider audience—fame and recognition he received only long after his death. [70], The musicologist Alan Lomax dismissed the myth, stating, "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme". Why that mystique surrounds Johnson rather than a number of others is probably unanswerable. The slide guitarist Ry Cooder had speculated that Johnson played facing a corner to enhance the sound of the guitar, a technique he called "corner loading". [63], In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. The songs weren't customary blues songs. To Clapton, Johnson is, “the most important blues musician who ever lived.”. His death was not reported publicly; he merely disappeared from the historical record and it was not until almost 30 years later, when Gayle Dean Wardlow, a Mississippi-based musicologist researching Johnson's life, found his death certificate, which listed only the date and location, with no official cause of death. Louis. In the 1920 census, he is listed as Robert Spencer, living in Lucas, Arkansas, with Will and Julia Willis. [84], The sad, romantic "Love in Vain" successfully blends several of Johnson's disparate influences. Two marriage licenses for Johnson have been located in county records offices. [71], Johnson is considered a master of the blues, particularly of the Delta blues style. Facial recognition software concluded that neither man was Johnson or Shines. Musicologist Alan Lomax went to Mississippi in 1941 to record Johnson, also not knowing of his death. [73] His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", in contrast to the prevailing Delta style of the time, more resembled the style of Chicago or St. Louis, with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement". He graduated from Freeport High School in 1964 and attended the University of Illinois where he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in History and … Finally, Gibson claimed the photo was from 1933-34 while it is now known that Johnson did not meet Shines until early 1937. The relationship was attested to by a friend, Eula Mae Williams, but other relatives descended from Robert Johnson's half-sister, Carrie Harris Thompson, contested Claud Johnson's claim. Definitely it’s quite fair to gauge that he exerted an influence, given how Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Led Zeppelin all covered Johnson’s songs at key moments of their growth. According to Elijah Wald, it was "the most musically complex in the cycle"[40] and stood apart from most rural blues as a thoroughly composed lyric, rather than an arbitrary collection of more or less unrelated verses.
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